The experiences in World of Warcraft through the eyes of a player that can't spend 10 hours a day raiding.

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

The Worst Punishment

For those that aren't familiar with the Leotheras the Blind fight, he basically switches between demon form and human form every minute. About 15 seconds in to the demon phase, he'll summon people's inner demons on a few random people. Those people have to kill their own inner demons (nobody else can do damage to them) within 30 seconds, or the demon will MC them, and then the rest of the raid has to kill them. So, every 2 minutes, you have to deal with the possibility of some people getting MC'ed/killed.

It gets kind of tricky for some classes as well. Hunters and Warlocks cannont use their pets. If the pet lands the killing blow on the inner demon, then the person will get MC'ed anyway. Then there's the obviousness of not all people in a raid are used to having to do DPS.

At any rate, we've had a few people get MC'ed while fighting Leo. We've told people what to do to practice and get ready for the scenario that you get Inner Demons. So, on our forums, we started posting ideas of things for non-dps classes/specs to do to kill your Inner Demon. My "suggestion" was that any mage that did not kill their inner demon would be kicked out of the guild.

It was a rather flippant suggestion, but it got me thinking about how bad of a thing that would be. I mean, we generally value our raiders, and kicking somebody out would most likely be just a joke. There's only 1 person that I can think of that we actually kicked out of the guild.

We used to have a derogatory rank where the person could not talk in Guild Chat. Then it almost became too much of a joke (people were asking for it), so we got rid of it. It was always a joke, but when people starting asking for it, it got a bit too distracting from our purpose.

At any rate, I was trying to think of what a "horrible" punishment would be. Or what have other people done? You could always hit them in the pocketbook by making them pay x amount of gold, or else they wouldn't get invited to another raid until doing so. If you have the guildies on the sidelines, you can always sub the person out. But that seems to be more along the lines of a bad raider... which a lot of these people are not. If they live close, you can make them bake you cookies. (Okay, see? I've run out of ideas already.)

So, any effective punishments that you've seen in Wow? And no, I'm not talking about /gkicking. I'm trying to think of creative punishments. Hmm... maybe something like making the guildie kill a certain type of elementals until they've farmed a certain amount of primals. If it was a fire mage, for example (and none of our mages have gotten MC'ed yet), you'd make them farm primal fire.

While we haven't yet attempted Leo (altho he's coming up next week), I can tell you what we do on our Kara badge runs.

Anyone who does something just downright newbish (moving on flame wreath, standing in someone else's beam, not moving from the charred earth, etc) has to sing to the rest of the raid on Vent. We choose silly songs like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and I'm a Little Teapot. We've also started using it for anyone who doesn't get under the water for Lurker's spout.

It's just embarrassing enough that you don't want to do it, yet not painful enough that people will /gquit or throw a hissy about it.

We have an established policy for fights where there's a clear "you f-ed up" thing that can happen (getting doomfire and dying on Archimonde, letting constructs into the raid on Gorefiend, getting MC'ed on Leo, dying to flame patch on Al'ar, etc.):

If the raid wipes and someone did one of those stupid things, that person pays 10g to the guild bank. For each subsequent offense, whether it was the same offender or a new one, the charge increases by 10g. You'd be surprised how rarely we ever get past We also open up the guild bank to pay for repairs during these raids, so basically the money just gets spread back into the raid.

It's a policy that both helps to keep people on their toes and helps to defray raiders' repair bills.

@Rohan: Since you obviously haven't been in any of the raids that I run, you would have no idea how I act during raids. And maybe I didn't fully explain myself. I'm not the type of raid leader that's yelling at people when they screw up. In fact, most of the time, I don't even want to assign blame, I just want to know what went wrong so we can fix it for the next attempt.

But I think a slight slap on the hands can help people be more aware and it can also make the wipes a little more fun (as long as it's not done to be mean spirited).

I think Shade's Flame Wreath is a perfect example. If you're in our guild, you've most likely run Kara multiple times. If you move on the Flame Wreath, you should pay for the wipe. There is no reason to move... at all... ever.

@halite: lol. The only time we had somebody sing was when this guy kept DC'ing. We told him the next time he did, he'd have to sing (yeah... lame songs like that). He serenaded us a lot that night.

@logan: How does your GL open up the vault? Does he just set everyone to 100g for repairs or something? Seems like you'd have to wipe a few times before you wouldn't start losing a ton of money.

You know, I'm not totally sure what limit the GL sets for our repairs (as a clothie, mine are relatively low). The money paid per wipe certainly doesn't cover all of our repair expenses, either. The whole practice is more of a token "your contribution to the guild bank is helping the raid as a whole" thing.

Generally we fund our guild bank by selling the enchanting mats from the greens we pick up in raids, as well as any BoE blues and patterns that drop (that raiders don't need, of course).

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About Me

I am the Guild Leader of Primogeniture, a raiding guild on Bronzebeard. Most of us have significant others and families, so we mostly devote our night hours (and lack of sleep) to working together. I've been playing for 3 years now, and have leveled multiple toons to cap.